herbertlNobody Is Coming to Save Your Career
https://alifeengineered.substack.com/p/nobody-is-coming-to-save-your-career
> I had over 20 managers across my 18 years at Amazon. They were mostly good managers, and some of them were great. But not one of them ever came to me unprompted and said, “Let’s talk about your career growth.”
Maybe not at Amazon, but surely at almost every big corporation I worked on, there were even milestones, and career matrixes.
Amazon has a career matrix (former employer). But they didn’t proactively help me with my career - not that I cared. My entire goal was to survive my 4 year initial offer and get the f** out of dodge. I was 46 when I was hired.
I'm at a different comapny and it's the same. They have some basic framework/matrix, but managers aren't going to help you get to the next level. In my experience the matrix isn't followed anyways - they promote whoever they want whether or not they meet the stuff in the matrix. It's all just opinion based anyways.
For the most part, "career matrixes", "development plans", and the like are just generic internal marketing to placate people and create the illusion that managers / the company care about their career development, and they don't have to do anything.
To a lesser extent performance reviews / ratings are the same - "you're doing great, keep it up!" - they don't really tell you what you need to do to progress. You have to figure that out and drive it for yourself.
In my experience (mainly IT related), when one first starting a career, first 5-10 years are standardized are promotion/title change for an average employee. After that if one is known by at least 1-2 level above their managers and/or other team managers, to have any chance of further growth. IME as time go by current managers have less and less power to promote as gap between manager and employee reduces.
Where I've seen them they tell you exactly what you should have been doing for the previous 5 years. People who guessed correctly what the career matrix would be 5 years ago and did that get promoted when they release it. However they change those all the time (or because budget is short kill it for a few years and then create a new one). Still there is enough in common that you can often guess right enough to get promoted.
The important part is when you do something that saves the day make sure people know. Never save the day quietly, if you write some defensive code so you don't get an emergency call at 2am you won't get promoted for saving the day at 2am! You have to make sure everyone knows you wrote that code. I've seen many people over my career who did those quiet works - they got a small senior position at best, then when they left the company quickly discovered how important those things were and suddenly they have a small department of very senior people doing that thing one person was quietly doing before. (this isn't just code - I know of a company that laid of their maintenance person because nothing ever went wrong so they must not need them - then needed 3 people to replace him in 6 months)
I work at Amazon and I’ve had almost the opposite experience. There are dedicated career check ins twice a year that managers are required to have (separate from pay change discussions). Each of the orgs I’ve worked in have also had their own career growth things - one of them required quarterly “how are you doing on your career goal?” questionnaires that you were supposed to review with your manager.
Frankly I’ve had _too many_ managers at Amazon wanting to talk about career growth. Maybe it’s just my org, but everyone is obsessed with it.
Let's be honest, nobody gives a shit about you personally in any job, you either deliver what you're paid to deliver or they couldn't care less if you're gone the next day and forget about you completely the day after, even if they like you on a personal level. Employees are an unpleasent expanse that the business must incur and if AI will make it feasible to replace all emloyees to save money, nobody will even blink an eye, just count the money saved.
> Employees are an unpleasent expanse that the business must incur and if AI will make it feasible to replace all emloyees to save money, nobody will even blink an eye, just count the money saved.
This is why many companies have already "achieved AGI internally". Just ask Block, Meta (x4), Amazon, xAI, JP Morgan, Oracle, Microsoft, Google, Atlassian, Morgan Stanley and so on.
People! They’re the worst!
Kidding aside, I am quite introverted and also quite happy alone. Not all the time, but more often than not.
If I had a business idea that i was passionate about and could do it with just AI and avoid hiring people? Yeah, I might do that.
On the other hand ideas are cheap and it seems to me a key differentiator between success and failure is marketing/sales, and execution that others can’t match.
I might be suffering a lack of imagination but I don’t see public models as an execution differentiator. If one person can do it so can another. Having an excellent team of people that know how to work well together and can execute is a differentiator. Enigibeers might be a dime a dozen. But great teams are not.
Marketing/sales. That might be getting a bite taken out by ai but it’s at the spam level of marketing and sales. Solid marketing and sales are the life blood of many successful orgs.
I think for AI to be a differentiator, it would have to be your own model, or your own dataset that elevates your model above others in execution.
> they couldn't care less if you're gone the next day and forget about you completely the day after
This is a lesson I wish I learnt earlier.
I quit thinking I was irreplaceable based on the sheer urgent firefighting load they put on me. Once I quit, never heard from them again. All those urgent tasks that somehow only I got assigned "because there's nobody else", suddenly managed to get done by someone else or nobody because they weren't actually urgent.
"If you want something done, give it to a busy person" - Benjamin Franklin
I was even the “lead” at a SaaS in daily firefighting mode and pushing new features out quickly on a team of three engineers and one half-time one. I was 99% sure they’d go down the next day I left but somehow they kept on trucking. We’re all replaceable whether we like to think it or not
I don't think any of my managers has ever been directly involved with having to deal with business expenses, so I don't think that's really a thing that they think about when managing me.
Also, for what it's worth, when I was let go from my previous job, my former manager actually kept checking my LinkedIn profile on a weekly basis, presumably to see if I'd landed a job. I think that might count as "giving a shit".
Well, the manager who railroaded me into a PIP at AWS also kept checking my LinkedIn profile. While my pre-PIP (“focus”) was 70% my fault. I was objectively railroaded toward my PIP. I kept meeting all of my goals and they kept adding more.
Not that I gave a shit. I was 46-50 and on my 8th job and knew what I was getting myself into from day one. I came in with a plan and had a job and multiple offers within 10 days
At every job I’ve had, across all the managers I’ve had, my immediate manager (and usually their manager as well) genuinely cared about me and my team and our well being as well as our careers. My _company_ and its executives surely didn’t give a damn if they even knew our names, but the actual humans I work face to face with definitely do.
My wife cares about me and won’t say “because Bob said I had to divorce you, you have to go”.
Any manager will let me go if their manager tells them to.
I’ve been part of organizational discussions. Every manager ive worked with has actively fought, and fought hard, to keep, promote, or get pay raises for their employees. They don’t just bend over and say “okay boss” if asked to cut people.
If you treat your managers like soulless entities and don’t build relationships with them, they’ll probably do the same to you. It’s a self fulfilling prophecy.
Well in my 30 year career across 10 jobs - everything from startups to BigTech and now working full time at a consulting company, I’ve found line level managers to be absolutely useless - not soulless.
When I was being recruited as a strategic early hire, one of my requirements was that I must report to the CTO/director and not a line level toothless engineering manager.
Also, every meaningful raise I’ve gotten has only come when I was reporting to someone above a line level manager.
Lets add some context. Amazon is the author's only job. 5yrs Software, 7yrs Senior, 4yrs Principal, now runs a YouTube self-help. Reading through there are multiple lines that collectively paint a picture of a difficult career.
"I had over 20 managers across my 18 years at Amazon", whilst this might be out of the author's hands, that's a wild manager history.
"..when I finally pushed for bigger scope at Amazon. My manager’s initial reaction wasn’t excitement. It was something closer to “But you’re doing so well where you are.”", most managers generally push their devs to always be doing larger pieces of work, if they aren't, that's weird.
"I was a passenger for the first 10 years of my Amazon career", which doesn't really line up, unless they're referring to their horizontal move to Prime in an effort to find promotive work.
"Not because I suddenly got better at my job, but because I started being intentional about which parts of my job were ... mapped to what the next level required.", which means the author worked out how to correctly market themselves internally.
"You know where you want to be in five years, and you’re actively seeking out the work that will get you there eventually.", again, they worked out how to find promotive work. This seems to be the key take-away they're dancing around.
> "..when I finally pushed for bigger scope at Amazon. My manager’s initial reaction wasn’t excitement. It was something closer to “But you’re doing so well where you are.”", most managers generally push their devs to always be doing larger pieces of work, if they aren't, that's weird.
From the business perspective, it may not be good to push. If they are really good at what they currently do, the manager would need to find a replacement, and there is no certainty that the old worker provides more value in the different job. When only the money is weighted, this will happen often. Seems to fit for Amazon's work culture.
The problem is bored employees find a new job elsewhere. Employees who feel they are not valued find a new job elsewhere. If you can find them a new job in the company you can have them train their replacement - years later the replacement can ask "do you remember why you did...". It also means if the old project has an emergency you have a bunch of people who can jump in much faster - to some extent this adding people to a late project won't make it latter (only some extent, it isn't perfect).
People also get old and retire (or die). By moving people around a bit you ensure that your training plan still works because you are using it. This also means there will be openings to move up the ladder, make sure you get the people on them. (There are stories from my company where after a big layout they got scared and hired almost nobody for the next 20 years, then those who made it passed the layoffs started retiring and there wasn't a mid level of engineers following to promote).
> most managers generally push their devs to always be doing larger pieces of work, if they aren't, that's weird.
Now weird at all, and maybe that's "most managers" within your career? I've seen my share of complacent managers who were fine with status quo.
I think most managers prefer the status quo; why wouldn't they? Charitably, you can think of it as an assumption on the manager's side that you're fine with the way things are, because you haven't said anything. Similar things can be said about salary.
I don't know why people assume managers are interested in increasing salaries and distributing promotions. Every incentive and preference works against those things. If you want change, you have to ask for it.
From my experience it is futile to ask for any meaningful salary changes. Bands are usually fixed. Unless you're severely underpaid, they won't increase your salary by much. There are only two ways to increase your salary: leave for bigger salary, or threaten to leave and stay for bigger salary.
> Your company has figured out the perfect arrangement. You’re good at your job, and you don’t cause problems. Your manager knows they can count on you. From the company’s perspective, this is the ideal state. Why would they change anything?
Whish I had knew this earlier in my career. I worked for IBM. I was very good at delivering usable software for internal use. They kept me there forever. They would give me awards and such, but never a change as the author says. If I needed something, I had to do it myself.
Steve makes the key point precisely: "AI is compressing the value of routine expertise... If your entire value is built on repeating what you already know how to do, that value is shrinking."
But what is the alternative? Most answers land on "learn new skills faster" — which is still repeating what you already know how to do, just in a different domain. The compression will catch up.
The capacity that doesn't compress is the one that operates before expertise: arriving at a genuinely unknown situation without a preset conclusion, staying open to what's actually there, finding the structure underneath it before you know what to look for. That's not a skill category most professional development tracks for — and it's exactly what determines whether a person directs AI or is directed by it.
Wrote about this specifically: https://medium.com/@genady_awarelife/youre-not-competing-wit...
But what is the alternative? Most answers land on "learn new skills faster" — which is still repeating what you already know how to do, just in a different domain. The compression will catch up.
The capacity that doesn't compress is the one that operates before expertise: arriving at a genuinely unknown situation without a preset conclusion, staying open to what's actually there, finding the structure underneath it before you know what to look for. That's not a skill category most professional development tracks for — and it's exactly what determines whether a person directs AI or is directed by it.
Wrote about this specifically: https://medium.com/@genady_awarelife/youre-not-competing-wit...